Nuke the Bullets!

Great advice in this video on SUPPORTING your talk with a presentation (Powerpoint, Keynote, etc), not leaning on it.

Home Office Design Tips — From a Financial Advisor?

In my occasional series of crappy newsletters, here’s another, sent by a financial planner.

The only professional I want to get office design tips from is an interior designer or furniture vendor.

With financial reform and the worldwide economic meltdown on most everyone’s mind, sending a newsletter with fluff like this makes me question whether this advisor is in the loop or out to lunch. C’mon, talk to me about something you’re a credentialed expert in!

Oh, the money saving tips? Crap I could get from Reader’s Digest like take your lunch to work instead of eating out and get DVDs free at the public library instead of renting them. You must be kidding.

This is another fine example of sending something for the sake of sending something. This advisor needs an editorial calendar. Big Time.

Oh, and the last straw? She actually PAID a vendor to give her a proverbial communications black eye.

If your boilerplate requires you to disclaim giving financial advice, at least print some material that verges on the topic!

Sheesh.

Oriental Rugs & Business Writing

True story: I was once written up for using college level vocabulary on the job. Yes, it was in a written performance evaluation. No, I was not writing for a living at the time; was running a line of business. You might not guess that my employer was a bank, where most workers had some college and many had MBAs. Go figure. Just one of the reasons I’m forever freelance.

There’s a place for arabesques in writing — that place is usually literature or narrative nonfiction. When I write for business I’ve learned to use them sparingly (or link to the definition!).

Business writers need to err on the side of spartan communications. Well-written, engaging and action-oriented, while spartan.

Trim the fat

Teaching by example, I edited the opening sentences of this WordPress blog post to rid it of verbal flourishes and the loathsome passive voice. I kept “nascent” for the paragraph’s arabesque.

It is with extremely great pleasure that I point you to the first post at the new I’m pleased to introduce you to the WordPress Foundation site. Not only am I excited about the things that will happen under the auspices of the Foundation, I’m proud of what the Foundation will do, and excited to see a site running the 3.0 development version and the nascent theme called 2010.

In the edited post above, “extremely great pleasure” and “under the auspices of” belong in a royal decree, not a business message.

Boilerplate blight

Since business communications are usually intended to sell something — an idea, product, feeling or investment — stick with the big picture or high concept.

I’ll make my point visually, with Oriental rugs (below). The closeup on the left shows intricate detail, but you can’t see the whole rug, whereas the photo on the right gives you the big picture at the cost of the individual motifs.

There’s an ideal use for each photo. If you were a rug merchant who had to choose between the two, you’d use the larger one to entice your prospective client into the store to examine the design and craftsmanship. Same with business communications, which are ultimately designed to sell anything from a product to a feeling to an investment. The goal of written communications is usually to get people to make the next step, which might be making the purchase or calling for more information.

Financial communications often require the equivalent of both photos (detail and big picture). If you’re writing something with boilerplate requirements, write less and use visuals like sidebars, graphics and headers to keep the reader’s attention on your pitch and off the fine print.

Visual perspective

When you look at the closeup of the rug to the left, you know you’re not looking at the entire rug because there are enough visual cues that it’s a part of the whole (no border, no symmetry of design, etc).

The photo to the right might be the rug’s border or the entire rug, but if I had to guess, I’d say it was a closeup of the border because if it were the entire rug the right and left ends wouldn’t be chopped off.

This photo clearly shows the entire rug, but you have no way to know if it’ll fit in your dining room. If it had been photographed with a dog, human or piece of furniture — better yet, a dining room table and chairs — you’d have a clue.

Whole-brain communications note: this post taught about writing but did so in a visual manner.

If you found this post useful, please sign up for my free monthly newsletter. Just scroll up to the top of the right column and fill in two blanks.

The Triumph of Snail Mail?

Although I write a lot about e-newsletters and social media communications I’m always on the lookout for merging them with old school direct mail. I was prepared to skip this WSJ article on direct mail because at first glance it pertained to retailers.  Then the article told of an insurance broker using humorous postcards (including the one above) to great effect and I stopped skimming. The broker told the WSJ that when he stopped sending postcards clients complained — many of them collected the cards  as “cubical art.” When he resumed his postcard campaign, he scored a $270,000 new account.

This reminds me of the days when computers replaced handwritten correspondence and press-on labels — I opened the printed envelopes first. But now the novelty of a handwritten address gets my attention. Same with email — the novelty has worn off and most of us are filtering, unsubscribing and otherwise purging senders from our busy lives.

The article offered this as best practice for snail mail:

The idea is to send something that’s more appealing than “junk” mail and potentially more noticeable than an email message, says Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. That allows business owners “to offer a personal touch the larger firms may not be able to have,” he says.

How well do you know your tribe?

I’m all for using whatever works for your audience, your tribe. I recently read Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk, known to many as the Wine Library TV guy. He’s crushing it on social media, especially video, and shares both his philosophy and tactics in the book. I picked up a thing or two from Gary myself (once I slim down I might even try some video!).

On the other end of the spectrum, one of my clients’ tribe is not web savvy, so she takes extra pains to label hot spots on her website (”click here”) instead of relying on them to mouse over without a prompt.  She recently discontinued her printed newsletter, started a blog and sends an email with each blog post.  I, on the other hand, don’t want to clog my subscribers’ inboxes with each blog update — a monthly newsletter with links to the past month’s posts works for my tribe.

Let’s start a productive conversation. I shared my content recycling strategy here – what’s yours? Here’s a little something on email’s dominance over social media – is this the case for your business? Please share your experience combining any and all forms of business communications/channels/media.

PIMCO’s Ring of Fire

Scroll down for writing prompts, bloggers & newsletter writers.

In my occasional series of publicly (and respectfully) editing business writing, this time I offer unsolicited advice to PIMCO, a leading global investment management firm, which publishes respected and widely-read newsletters.

Today I read  The Ring of Fire, written Mr William H. Gross, a founder of PIMCO who oversees the management of more than $800b of fixed income securities (among many other things). It started off well enough with a personal reflection on his long and distinguished career and the careers of others, but I’d have shortened this part by a couple of paragraphs.

Then the segue:

There have been numerous changeups and curveballs in the financial markets over the past 15 months or so. Liquidation, reliquidation and the substituting of the government wallet for the invisible hand of the private sector describe the events from 30,000 feet. Now that a semblance of stability has been imparted to the economy and its markets, the attempted detoxification and deleveraging of the private sector is underway.  Having survived due to a steady two-trillion-dollar-plus dose of government “Red Bull,” Adderal or simply black coffee, the global private sector is now expected by some to detox and resume a normal cyclical schedule where animal spirits and the willingness to take risk move front and center. But there is a problem. While corporations may be heading in that direction due to steep yield curves and government check writing that have partially repaired their balance sheets, their consumer customers remain fully levered and undercapitalized with little hope of escaping rehab as long as unemployment is at 10-20% levels worldwide. “Build it and they will come” is an old saw more applicable to Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams than today’s economy. “Say’s Law” proclaiming that supply creates its own demand is hardly applicable to a modern day credit-oriented society where credit cards are maxed out, 25% of homes are underwater, and job and income creation are nearly invisible.

OK, before you look at my table of edits below, ask yourself “What does he want me to know? What should I expect next?” Myself, I didn’t predict that he’d head into a global economic analysis since the segue focused exclusively on America. This isn’t fiction, or even narrative nonfiction,  Mr Gross, this is business writing. Point the headlights where you intend to steer the vehicle.

Surgical edits to what WAS written

Instead of	I’d write
There have been numerous changeups and curveballs in the financial markets over the past 15 months or so.	The financial markets threw us a number of changups and curveballs these past 15 months or so. (drop the passive voice)
Liquidation, reliquidation and the substituting of the government wallet for the invisible hand of the private sector describe the events from 30,000 feet.	The invisible hand of the market has been replaced by the government wallet and we’ve seen liquidation and reliquidation. (the sentence is more active now and that cliche– ‘30,000 feet’– removed)
Now that a semblance of stability has been imparted to the economy and its markets, the attempted detoxification and deleveraging of the private sector is underway.	Now that the economy and its markets have achieved some semblance of stability, the private sector’s detoxification and liquidation is underway. (isn’t that more clear?)
Having survived due to a steady two-trillion-dollar-plus dose of government “Red Bull,” Adderal or simply black coffee, the global private sector is now expected by some to detox and resume a normal cyclical schedule where animal spirits and the willingness to take risk move front and center. But there is a problem.	However, there is a problem in the thinking that the private sector can resume a normal cyclical schedule after two-trillion-dollar doses of government “Red Bull,” Adderal or plain black coffee. It just doesn’t work that way. Here’s why: (and then go into bullets)

I’ll say this, the article is full of writing prompts

My editing scalpel safely retired to the autoclave, I took some points from Mr Gross’ article to help bloggers and newsletter writers in search of a juicy topic.

• The PIMCO Ring of Fire includes the US, Japan and six European countries whose public debt is most likely to reach 90% of GDP (with an ensuing 1% fall in growth). If you look at the graph (a nice one) you’ll see that the countries identified as less likely than those in the Ring of Fire to stumble are Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Australia. Mr Gross says these countries are “considered to be most conservative and potentially more solvent, with the potential for higher growth.” If you’re a Forex trader advisor or investor, does this have any bearing on your recommendations or holdings?

• Mr Gross argues for tilting growth-focused (and currency) assets toward countries like China, India and Brazil. What’s your position and why, advisors and investors?
  

• If you want to avoid developing economies, Mr Gross says look north to Canada, our more conservative neighbor (I wrote about this here). He also says to avoid the UK. How does this inform your investment strategy?
  

• Last year Denmark (one of the countries farthest from the Ring of Fire) was named “The happiest country on Earth” by social scientists at Blue Zones Project . ABC ’s 20/20 story homed in on the social egalitarianism of Danes, who don’t derive great personal status from their job choices. “Denmark is what is called a ‘post consumerist’ society. People have nice things, but shopping and consuming is not a top priority. Even the advertising is often understated. Along with less emphasis on ’stuff,’ and a strong social fabric, Danes also display an amazing level of trust in each other, and their government.”  Comment on what this might foretell about the path of American deleveraging– do the Danes lead you to believe the deleveraging Mr Gross describes might not be all that bad after all?

• While we’re on the subject, Danes pay some of the highest taxes in the world — between 50 percent and 70 percent of their incomes. In exchange, the government covers all health care and education, and spends more on children and the elderly than any country in the world per capita. What say ye about health insurance reform, Americans?

• In the most recent study of happiness, directed by University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart and administered from Stockholm, “the survey found that freedom of choice, gender equality, and increased tolerance are responsible for a considerable rise in overall world happiness. The results shatter the more simplistic and traditionally accepted notion that wealth is the determining factor, says Inglehart.”  Is it possible that we Americans can learn to see ourselves — and each other — differently after this shared economic hardship?

Where’s the News in Your Newsletter?

My inbox is clogged with so-called newsletters from people who must have made a resolution to “communicate more” or “do more marketing” in 2010.

Most of them are, in a word, crap.

In two words, self serving.

In three words, not worth reading.

Win a lifetime gift certificate for my services

If you can find the “news” in this “newsletter” I’ll work for you for the rest of my life for free!

(Redacted) brings proven, practical solutions to business challenges with a clear focus on the bottom line. We represent (verbal diahrrea). Our Practice Areas include:

CONSULTING and TRAINING (8 bullets)

COACHING (4 bullets)

If you’ve read this far you’re one in a million.

CAREER TRANSITION (2 bullets)

SALES PERFORMANCE AND REVENUE GROWTH (5 bullets)

(Redacted) mission is to assist organizations in developing and sustaining inclusive environments where all employees can do their best work (blah blah blah).

We work with organizations (yada yada yada).

If you’ve read this far you’re one in a billion.

An advertisement lodged into a newsletter template

This is  best described as an awful ad or an internal document designed to remind the staff who they are and what they do. Releasing it to the public is a sure way to lose subscribers or gain a reputation with your service provider as a spammer.

Not sure what to write about?

Afraid you’ll run afoul of federal CAN-SPAM regs?

Anything I can do to help? 704-907-2811

Best advice: ask yourself, “Would I read this if it came from someone else?” The sender of this advertisement would surely have to answer “No.”

Sharing Deep, Sharing Wide

One of my clients called last week to say,  “I love your newsletter but I want your blog delivered to my email too.”

No need. Every blog post for the preceding month is referenced in my monthly newsletter (along with some original content). Why do I do this?  My readers have lives of their own and I need to make it easy for them to access my information (duh).

The good people at ShareThis have a little application that can be inserted into blogs and websites. It enables readers to share what they’re reading via email and social media platforms in a couple of clicks/keystrokes. This gives ShareThis a unique vantage point from which to watch sharing behavior.

And what do they know? 46% of shared information reaches its new destination via email, in spite of social networking sites in the aggregate edging email out.

Tweets and Retweets

I owe a great deal of my traffic flow to Twitter, where I actively participate in financial, economic and marketing conversations and share what I’ve written as it’s appropriate.  At least a third of my blog traffic is Twitter generated, so I was surprised to read ShareThis stats on this beloved service:

We found that Twitter is the least engaging share platform with users visiting an average of 1.66 pages when they click through to a site, while users coming in off e-mail were the most engaged, visiting 2.95 pages (emphasis mine),  and Facebook trailing closely behind 2.76 page views. Of course this varies by vertical and site, but if you think about your own habits, it makes sense. Getting an emailed link from a friend may cause you to pay more attention than the more random discovery that you get on Twitter as you consume quick opinions. We think there is tremendous potential for Twitter to increase its engagement when and if better filters are applied – the type of filters that Facebook has built in from the start.

My best recommendation, even if you devote time to build your presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites, re-distribute your messages with a regular e-newsletter. A belt & suspenders approach to being heard.

Six Shortcuts to a Knee Whack

We all love shortcuts, but sometimes they backfire.

I see professionals in financial services and the law taking shortcuts with their newsletters and  email marketing efforts all the time.  Nothing’s worse than a self-inflicted knee whack.

Be sure to scratch these six shortcuts off your list — they’ll definitely get you into trouble.

1. Add everyone from your Rolodex into your email subscriber list/ troll for email addresses online/ buy a list of email addresses

• To comply with CAN-SPAM guidelines, each person on the list must OPT IN, verbally or otherwise
• This shortcut violates the service terms of every internet service provider (ISP) think: Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail etc
• It really irritates recipients, making them likely to report you as a spammer
• ISPs and corporate email services are aggressively scrubbing unsolicited email from recipient mailboxes. The more services that block you today, the more services are likely to block you tomorrow

2. Send bulk email from your own outbox

For an average-sized email list you can send a monthly newsletter for $30-50. Here’s what you get in exchange  for your pittance:

• Handling subscribe and unsubscribe requests according to federal guidelines
• Automated management of  bounced emails and your email list
• Dealing with spam complaints made against you
• More of your messages hit the inbox instead of the spam filter.  Email services have  relationships with ISPs that you  don’t have and can’t afford to develop

3. Make it easier for readers to hit “spam” than to un-subscribe

If you’re emailing to the US, you must provide a mechanism for recipients to stop receiving your messages. Don’t hide or minimize the unsubscribe link in your email.

When someone hits “spam” or labels your email “junk” your reputation with the ISPs takes a hit (they’re watching). If you earn a reputation with one or more ISPs as a spammer, it’s almost impossible to get your messages delivered anywhere.  While results vary by the filter policy of each ISP,  the 2008 Lyris report says it’s the sender’s reputation driving 25% of messages to the SPAM folder.

Bottom line: you don’t want to talk to people who don’t want to hear from you.

4.  Load up your message with “spammy” words

With 15% of all reported spam last month was finance-oriented, ISPs are aggressively scrubbing emails with references or offers related to money, the stock market or other financial “opportunities” including investments, credit reports, real estate and loans. Here’s a partial list of words that typically trip the spam filters.

5.  Bombard your list

In a study by Merkle this year, the main reasons subscribers choose to opt out of email programs are perceived irrelevance (75%) and sending too frequently (73%).

Promotional emails were deemed the most intrusive. Solution? Make your newsletter informative, not promotional.

Merkle reported that 20% of those receiving e-newsletters thought they were worthy of reading,which means 80% thought what they received was crap. Further, people reported receiving on average,about eight newsletters each month. That’s a heap of competition for YOUR customers’ attention.

6. Send crap for the sake of sending something

I receive a monthly newsletter from an Infiniti car dealer. I look forward to it for the same reason some people watch horror flicks.One edition was devoted to movie trends and the price of popcorn while another included a series of profiles of famous explorers from the 15th  century.

Crap.

I’m not imaginative enough to tie movies and explorers to the latest model sports car; this dealer doesn’t even try!

The surest way to avoid sending crap is to devise an editorial calendar. Without one, you risk losing subscribers. Or you’ll only keep subscribers like me who want to mock you in their blogs.

For more information here’s a download of a CAN-SPAM guide and a PowerPoint with more details.

Editing the Fed

I’ve been so bold as to edit Prince Charles and the pope, so why not the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank?

Consider the Fed’s analysis of Canadian vs. American housing and lending trends.

Why Canada might be “a country that got things right”

The report led off well enough:

Housing markets in the United States and Canada are similar in many respects, but each has fared quite differently since the onset of the financial crisis. A comparison of the two markets suggests that relaxed lending standards likely played a critical role in the U.S. housing bust.

It’s written in easily-understood prose and comes to a succinct conclusion. But if you read the report (and re-read once or twice), you’ll agree that my re-write would have been a better approach, not just by virtue of the writing, but also by virtue of the more comprehensive (and candid) conclusion:

Unlike the U.S., Canada has not experienced a dramatic increase in mortgage defaults, nor has any Canadian bank required a government bailout. This article explores the differences between the two countries’ monetary policies, financial services structure and regulation, and the kinds of mortgage products offered. While the primary culprit behind the American financial services crisis was the rise in subprime loans,  those products, and indeed the housing bubble itself, were enabled by monetary policy and financial services regulation.

Conclusions drive structure

An introduction like this would have led to an entirely different STRUCTURE of the paper, as well.  As written, the Fed meandered through data on housing prices, loan-to-value stats, delinquency rates, central bank target rates, and benchmark mortgage interest rates before getting around to contextualizing them. Most readers’ eyes were glazed over by then.

I would have taken the inverse approach, noting the differences in subprime booms between the countries (and the American bust) and then comparing and contrasting the factors that DROVE those differences, including monetary policy and regulation.  I would also have quoted sociologists on the differences in risk tolerance between us and our “neighbors to the north” as we so often call them.

The Fed is not apolitical, so I guess I should give a nod to the possibility that it was motivated to obfuscate.  Alas, these are the times in which we live.

Burned by Boilerplate

As we hurtle towards 2010 some financial advisors and life insurance agents keep communicating like it’s 1999.

The boilerplate communications racket

In the past week I got two identical Thanksgiving e-cards from different reps of the same general agency. Uh oh. It started with an email inviting me to “click here and view the card on a secured site…” which launched a browser, inside of which played a little flash file of autumnal photos — an animated version of the cheesiest Hallmark card ever printed. It was “customized” with the name of its sender.

Awash in meaninglessness

This week I got this email from a rep that said:  “Every few months, I try to keep my clients and friends up-to-date with current financial issues or critical concerns…” and once again I was invited to view this important update by linking to a secured site.

She set my expectations right up front by promising “up-to-date with current financial issues or critical trends.” I don’t know about you, but I thought  “financial issues or critical trends” might include  something like financial services reform and how this rep is going to go above and beyond the  regs to assure my confidence. Or perhaps a report on how how certain classes of annuities performed… How naive of me.

I clicked the link and got a flash-powered thingy that looked like a PowerPoint deck. The lead screen made the further promise “Providing valuable information of particular interest to you.” Wow, to me!

I then learned that (gasp) “Most people are frustrated by the amount of income tax they’re paying.” Really?

Next came a little lesson on the miracle of compounding interest. Be still my beating heart.

At the end I learned that there was a difference between tax-deferred and taxable income. A targeted message if ever there was one.

And what was the conclusion?  “There could be ways to reduce your tax liability and optimize growth!“  You’re kidding!  Somebody thought of that?

Then there was the lame call to action “Please provide information.” Clicking through I faced a comment box and the warning that I should allow 48 hours for a representative to get back to me. 48 hours? No one in 2009 is going to be that patient. If they want a product they could already buy it online in 48 hours.

You need to stop this. Right now!

I know you work under compliance regs and some companies and agencies are tougher than others.

I also know that these boilerplate services cut deals with the companies and agencies.

Still, there’s no excuse for sending out crap, absolute crap. If your compliance department won’t allow anything besides this boilerplate pablum, abstain altogether.

If your company has an approval process for customized communications, get on the stick! If not, pick the phone off  its cradle and call your clients to wish them a happy new year. THAT will get their attention.

Authenticity can’t be bought, but is priceless

If you’re doing a mass customization communications campaign, do the job properly. For clues of where this boilerplate went into the ditch, look for my snarky comments above in blue.

If this all sounds like work, you’re right. Tell you what, give me a copy of your compliance requirements and I’ll devise a compliant communications strategy.

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